Fervor (20 page)

They positioned themselves around the unconscious man again, and struggled through the remainder of the journey to their door. Once inside, they hastened to get Elliot into Sarah’s room and lay him on their Fixer’s bed.

Francis’s twitching was now rather pronounced. He chocked it up to physical exertion and stumbled his way back to his own room. Had Sarah not been so preoccupied with Elliot, she likely would have followed him, just to make sure that he actually was okay. Instead, she leaned over their technician friend, trying to make the connection that she would need to start healing him.

“
It’s so faint,”
Sarah lamented to Sam.
“I don’t know if I can make this work.”

“
You have to at least try,”
Sam pointed out.
“This is Elliot that we are talking about. We need him.”

“
It wouldn’t matter who it was, Sam. I’m a Fixer; I would have to try anyway. I’m just saying that this is going to be really difficult. I need you to prepare yourself for the fact that I might not succeed. That certainly doesn’t mean I won’t try, it just means that there is a possibility that I’ll fail.”

Sarah pushed Sam away after that. She threw up her walls as solidly as she could manage so there would be little to disrupt her concentration on Elliot. Resting her small head on his chest, with one hand perched atop his ribs, and the other gripping Elliot’s shoulder, she closed her eyes and went to work.

Sam cautiously opened the case that they suspected contained the Languorite. It had slid to the side opposite of Sarah, resting on the bed. Sam could not unknot the strap and lift it over Elliot’s head without disturbing the Fixer, so he resorted to sliding the case’s contents out into his hand. He and Fiona moved away from Sarah’s bed to examine it.

“
It looks a little like a glow torch,”
Sam observed, shifting closer to Fiona.

The casing was made out of some non-descript metal, a darker coloured material with a silvery sheen. Instead of the flat lens covering the colourless crystals that illuminated in response to the user’s magic that you would find in a glow torch, there was a small, many-faceted sphere affixed at one end. It shone with a myriad of colours without any fuel from an outside force. Sam wondered if it had its own internal fuel source, or if it automatically drew magic in from those around it. Elliot had mentioned, after all, that the Languorite functioned on a passive level, and for the most part, did not need activation from those who were using it.

That was when a notion struck him. If what Elliot had said was true, the Languorite was likely working right now, and they still did not know exactly what it could do yet. This idea startled the smaller boy so much that he almost dropped it. Without any hesitation, he raced back over to the bed and hurriedly slipped it back into its case.

“
What are you doing
?” Fiona protested.
“We weren’t finished looking at that.”

There seemed to be something odd about her. Sam looked at her more closely. There was a tremor to her limbs as well, reminiscent to Francis’s twitchiness, but to a lesser extent. She had not been willing to carry her share of Elliot’s weight, and therefore was likely less fatigued than the Teller, but apparently, the effort had taken its toll on her as well.

“
I had a good enough look at it to know that we likely shouldn’t be handling it again until Elliot is awake,”
Sam explained.

“
If he wakes up at all,”
the older girl sighed.

“
We don’t know everything that it does, and some of its functions are passive and persistent, remember? Who knows what it is doing right now?”
Sam stated, watching Sarah adjust her position as she moved on to healing some of Elliot’s other injuries. While still very dim compared to Sam, Fiona, and especially Sarah, the man’s presence in the connection was actually strengthening as a result of her efforts. That boded well for Elliot and the youths that he had vowed to help.

“
Of course I remember,”
Fiona grumbled internally.
“I am a Keeper after all. Aren’t you curious? He assured us that the Languorite would help us, not hurt us. That’s why he was
bringing it to us. How could it do any harm to examine it? The passive functions would already be having their effects on us anyway, and there’s no chance that we could use any of the ones that need to be activated without knowing how to do it. I’m sure that it’s safe.”

“
Well you can look at it all you want – I’m not going near it,”
Sam declared.
“I’ll stick around until Sarah’s done, though; in case she needs anything, or in case Elliot wakes up.”

“
I wouldn’t hold my breath,”
Fiona murmured, admiring the thing that they had been waiting for, for so long. The faceted sphere seemed to glimmer in strange ways at unexpected moments.
“It’s so pretty, and holding it makes my skin tingle, like the nice kind of goose-bumps you get when something makes you feel really good.”

“
What?”
Sam hadn’t really noticed anything like that when he had held it, but now that she mentioned it, there was a prickly pleasantness to his own skin. She held it out to him.

“
Hold it again, and see for yourself,”
she offered.

He shook his head, and took a step back, just to make it clear that he still wasn’t willing to handle it again. Beside him, Sarah muttered something incomprehensible from her bed and had now moved up to Elliot’s head wound, but her gestures had become sluggish, and it was obvious that this fixing was taking a lot out of the small girl She was barely able to hold her head up. Sam was pretty sure that she was going to crash soon, and not necessarily when she had finished all the fixing on Elliot that she had had to do. It was bad enough that they had been forced awake during the middle of the night. He knew that the weaker the link to the connection the person that she was fixing had, the greater the toll her fixing efforts took on her.

Fiona shrugged and went back to fiddling with the device while Sam focussed his attention on Sarah. She lasted about twenty more minutes before she started moving towards Elliot’s feet and then slumped forward across his lower legs, too exhausted to move any farther. Sam walked over and gently eased her off of Elliot and onto the end of the bed. He pulled one of the blankets over her, checking in on Elliot through the connection as he did so.

“
That’s enough for now, Sarah. You’ve done what you can, and from what I can tell, he ought to pull through. You get some sleep, and prepare yourself to see what more you can do for him tomorrow. Maybe then we can get some answers from him, like what happened to him and his hover, how he managed to get his hands on the Languorite, anything new that he discovered about what it can do, and anything else that he knows that can prove useful to us. It’s a true miracle that he’s here. Let’s just hope that it wasn’t all in vain.”
He thought this quietly at her, as he felt her slipping into slumber, remarking on the situation more for his own benefit than for hers.

Sam glanced over at Elliot. Sarah’s handiwork was evident. The wound on his head was gone, and his breathing was now more fluid and regular – not shallow like it had been when they had finally managed to get him up the front steps. He had lost some of his pallor and the blueness to his lips.

Sam moved a little closer, looking intently at the sleeping man’s face. He allowed his gaze to linger there, not having seen an adult in almost five years. He wondered if he would ever have the opportunity to grow, and to look like this. It was frustrating being trapped in the body of a small child, no matter what the benefits, when his maturing mind had now overstepped the capabilities of his immature body, and being as small as he was made him so vulnerable to outside threats.

As these thoughts rose to the surface, movement caught Sam’s eye. Fiona was returning what they had assumed to be the Languorite to its case, a grimace on her usually placid face.

“
Is there something wrong with it?”
Sam asked. She shook her head
.

“
No it’s fine. It’s me. I’m tired and feeling a little off, and I think I pulled something when we carried Elliot up from the beach. There must have been some way that we could have included Nathan. He’s so much stronger than we are. With his help, we would have gotten Elliot back here in half the time and with half the effort from the rest of us,”
she replied, some of the strain that she had mentioned showing in her face.

“
We can talk to Francis about it tomorrow, when there’s more time to discuss things like this, once Nathan has left for his circuit. Maybe he’ll have some ideas on how we can tell Nathan about this without exposing Elliot to the people who Nathan is on watch for,”
the smaller boy stated.

Fiona made a face at the suggestion of discussing anything with the Teller, still holding a grudge. She sighed.

“
I suppose you’re right, and maybe I should have been more willing to listen to Sarah in the first place. Francis seems to be more interested in going along with all of this than I would have expected, even to the point of starting to share some of the information that he had been hiding from us. I still don’t like him though, and I doubt you’ll ever convince me that I should. He goes on about doing things in order to protect us, but after our conversation, I’m certain that everything he ever did was primarily to protect himself,”
she griped.

“
You know he couldn’t lie about that. He really did think that he was protecting us,”
Sam countered.
“That’s why Sarah trusts him so much. That’s why she thinks that you are being unfair.”

“
Maybe he talked himself into believing it, while he made up excuses for his own behaviour. Did you ever consider that?”
She grimaced a little again, and yawned.
“I’m going back to bed. There’s nothing more that we can do here right now. Like you said, we’ll talk about it again in the morning.”

Looking somewhat uncomfortable, she headed off for her own room.

Sam stared for a few moments at the sleeping man and the small girl curled motionlessly at his feet. Elliot’s arrival was going to change things for them one way or another. Either they would have the opportunity to let the Languorite work its magic, and perhaps not even Elliot knew what all of those changes would bring, or they would get caught by those who had thrown them all into this mess to begin with, and none of them knew exactly what those consequences would be, although Francis had suggested he had some idea. As if that was not enough, there was still the possibility that Royce and his friends could somehow get wind of this, and that could easily be another disaster waiting in the wings.

Sam shuddered, and not just because these thoughts had him worried. He could still see the goose-bumps on his arms, as the tingle continued there, as well as on his cheeks and along the back of his neck. It wasn’t uncomfortable in anyway, but it was distracting enough that despite being desperately tired, Sam wondered if would actually be able to fall asleep. He decided that he had better try. After seeing Sarah stir a little, and then settle again, he headed for his own room, planning on returning as soon as he awoke the next morning.

He had just stepped out of Sarah’s room, and was closing the door when Nathan appeared at his own doorway.

“
Sam? What are you doing up. I thought maybe that last bit of thunder had woken Sarah. I felt a little distress from her through the connection when the crash nearly shook me out of bed. Why would you be awake? There’s no way that you would have heard that. I figured you were down for the night when you wandered off to your room earlier.”

Sam froze. He could not let Nathan know about Elliot because then the Watcher would want to see him, but he could not tell the larger boy that he had been checking on Sarah because of the thunder either. Sam knew that it was not Nathan’s fault that he wanted to know why Sam was creeping around at night. It was that protective urge that was part of being a Watcher, the one that had brought him out here in response to the last loud crash in the first place, and if any of the house-family was acting out of the ordinary Nathan would be compelled to find out why. He just wanted them to be safe.

“
I-I had a bad dream, and then I couldn’t go back to sleep.”
That was, after all, how the situation with Elliot had started, and he couldn’t have gone back to sleep because it was necessary to fetch the injured technician.

Nathan drew closer
.

“
You’re soaked! Were you out in the storm? What were you doing going out there, in that mess, in the middle of the night? It’s dangerous!”